By Najete Michell and Paul Taylor
President Macron’s poll ratings have slumped to 20%. His party has been rejected by voters. In 2024, it came third in the European elections and lost its plurality in the general election, having previously lost its absolute majority in 2022. Macron has had four prime ministers since the beginning of 2024.
Macron’s attempt to impose austerity by any means necessary is at the root of his political crisis. His main political enemy is La France Insoumise (LFI) which champions the call, ‘Macron must go.’
La France Insoumise has declared that it will move a vote of confidence against any nominee Macron makes for prime minister who does not come from the left – the largest bloc in parliament.
The right is united on austerity
Macron’s unpopularity reflects a crisis of legitimacy for bourgeois politics in France and across Western Europe. During the “thirty glorious years” of economic growth after 1945, it was possible to raise all boats: those days are long gone.
The question is, who will pay?
All the right-wing parties agree with Macron that the answer is the working class and the oppressed by using state-led austerity to make investment more profitable. In short, for the mass of people to work harder and longer.
However, austerity has not resulted in a growing economy, but great riches being further concentrated at the top, a decline in state revenues and economic stagnation.
Barnier and Bayrou propose €60bn cuts and tax increases, lowering capital taxation; making the labour market more ‘flexible’; cutting pensions and unemployment benefits; cutting public spending and reducing the public debt.
Capital, the right-wing parties and the bourgeois press are all united in demanding this programme. As for the far right RN, it poses as a fake friend of the people. It voted against budget proposals by the left to defend the living standards of the many.
For Macron and capital, France’s welfare state is ‘unaffordable’ and must be diluted or abolished. He is determined to impose austerity and break any resistance by authoritarian attacks on democracy.
Macron also wants to destroy the effectiveness of LFI in parliament and its growing links with mass protest. The President has used Article 49.3 of the constitution to force through legislation without a parliamentary vote twenty-four times.
The centrepiece of his attack remains the law increasing the age of retirement which is opposed by the overwhelming majority of the population and resisted for over a year with demonstrations by millions and strikes across the country.
Macron’s ‘coup de force’
Before the July 2024 elections, all twenty-seven published polls said the RN would win. However, by campaigning to stop the RN and for a rupture with austerity, the left Nouveau Front Populaire [NFP] emerged as the largest bloc in the National Assembly after the second round in July 2024 with the Macronists second and the RN third.
But Macron in a ‘coup de force’ refused to appoint the NFP nominee as prime minister. Instead, he chose Michel Barnier from a party which had only won 7% of the vote. Then, following Barnier’s resignation, Macron turned to François Bayrou from the MoDem party which has even less support.
Nominated in September, Barnier put forward his proposal for the 2025 budget.
But in the National Assembly Finance Committee the NFP, led by LFI, won a series of amendments to increase revenue rather than the €60 billion cuts and tax increases proposed by Barnier.
However, the left amendments were defeated in the National Assembly. “Macronists and the far right have rejected the budget for greater social and environmental justice that the NFP managed to build,” said Mathilde Panot for LFI.
Afterwards, the original Barnier budget went to the right-wing dominated second chamber, the Senate, where amendments led to a more severe austerity budget returning to the National Assembly. Macron and Barnier chose to use Article 49.3 of the French Constitution to force the budget through. In response, the left submitted the PM to a vote of no confidence. The RN voted also for it and as a result the Barnier government collapsed.
François Bayrou was nominated by Macron as Barnier’s successor. He tried to divide the left in negotiations with the SP, the CP and the Greens. A January 16 vote of confidence tabled by LFI was backed by the Greens and the CP. But the SP voted against as did the right and the RN. This LFI-led vote of confidence did not succeed.
The Socialist Party’s electoral fortunes had been revived by NUPES in 2022. But the SP has been a very reluctant supporter of left unity and keen to break with the left coalition to serve Macron. The politics and economics of the SP remain subordinate to the needs of capital. The current leader, Olivier Faure, has been zig-zagging in a desperate effort to restore the SP as the dominant force on the left but is well aware that without the LFI his party would be reduced to a handful of MPs.
As LFI explained, by abstaining on the no-confidence against Bayrou the SP “masked the central responsibility of the RN which, by not voting for censorship, ensured the survival of a government dedicated to the neoliberal obsessions of Emmanuel Macron.”
However, it is important to note that the SP is divided. Eight SP MPs broke ranks voting for the no-confidence. The SP parliamentary fraction was divided 36-30 in its support for Bayrou.
Racism
Support for racism and imperialism on the right has accelerated. The right wants to divide the resistance of the working class and the oppressed to austerity. Following Macron’s recent comments about the ‘ungratefulness’ to France of Africans, and also people in Mayotte [following the devastating cyclone], the right and the far right have whipped up a hostile campaign against Algerians.
Macron’s presidency has seen a growing movement of the right to the far right, especially on Islamophobia, immigration and security. Macron has elevated the role of the RN to be an arbiter in his political choices.
The appointment of the last two prime ministers was approved by the RN. Three key posts in the government are compatible with RN politics and will lead to more racism Bruno Ratailleau from the conservative LR is the Minister of the Interior who channels RN policies, including proposing a referendum on immigration. The new Justice Minister, Gerald Darmanin was the previous Minister of the Interior responsible for the repressive and racist law on immigration. The new Minister of Overseas [ie France’s colonies] Manuel Valls, prime minister under Hollande, has a record of racist remarks on Romas, black people and immigration.
The recent death of RN founder Jean-Marie Le Pen saw more ‘dédiabolisation’ (de-demonisation) of the far right and the heirs of Vichy France, including PM Bayrou praising him. On the right and in much of the bourgeois media Le Pen was described as a patriot and ahead of his time in ‘defending’ France against Muslims. Far from reminding people of his links to the Waffen SS and his self-confessed role in torture in Algeria or his dismissal of the gas chambers used by the Nazis in the Holocaust as a ‘footnote of history’, people spontaneously celebrating the end of an era were attacked by mainstream politicians and sections of the media as being in bad taste.
The left united
The importance of left unity was seen in the 2022 presidential elections. Mélenchon of LFI had come very close to being in the run-off against Macron, rather than Le Pen. He got around 22% while the Socialist Party had 1.7%, the Communist Party 2.3 % and the Greens (EELV) 4.63%.
For the subsequent 2022 parliamentary elections, La France Insoumise proposed a united left bloc, called NUPES, which allowed the SP, the CP and the Greens not to disappear from parliament. It succeeded in denying Macron an absolute majority.
But the three other left parties broke with the LFI, going their separate ways in the June 2024 European elections which were won by the RN. The defeat of his party in the European elections was a big setback for Macron.
Macron decided to dissolve the National Assembly and had in mind a coalition government with the RN. But the right and far right never expected the left to unite so quickly. Within a day of the parliamentary dissolution the four parties of the left met, discussed the program they had been working on for two years and agreed a new alliance, the Nouveau Front Populaire NFP.
La France Insoumise (LFI)
LFI’s unwavering opposition to austerity and racism has been decisive in raising the strength of the left after the disaster of the presidency of François Hollande (2012-17) whose approval rating plummeted to 4%. LFI has overtaken the Socialist Party as the biggest party on the left, significantly ahead of the Greens and the CP.
It understands that France is in the middle of a protracted class struggle which has intensified in recent times. LFI has been playing the leading role in fighting for unity with an insistence on implementing the programme left MPs were elected on, rather than following the path of the SP’s support for the Bayrou government.
Racism is openly deployed by the right to divide the working class and the oppressed. The left can only become the leadership of the majority by not giving an inch to racism; by consistently putting forward a complete break with austerity and by opposing war. For denouncing the genocide in Gaza LFI has been labelled “antisemitic.” Some of their MPs have been accused of being “apologists for terrorism” and summoned by the police. Others have been threatened, their houses attacked by the far right. But they are still standing up and fighting for the people.
LFI is under constant attacks by all sections of the right and bourgeois media because it refuses to back down on these principles. LFI is growing, especially in the cities and the ‘quartiers populaires’ with mass campaigns to increase the turnout of those who have previously abstained.
Without LFI the left would be still overwhelmed by the weight of the failure of the Hollande presidency: politics in France would now be completely dominated by the right, and a worsening movement of the right towards the far right, as in many other European countries.
LFI is calling on the left to unite behind the demand for Macron’s resignation. The president has lost his legitimacy, his core policy of austerity is opposed by the overwhelming majority.